Your brain can reveal if you’re rightwing – plus three other things it tells us about your politics

By Matt Qvortrup, Coventry University

A few years ago, the leader of Mexico’s PRI party told the New York Times that he, “would stick to tried and trusted campaign tools, like polls and political intuition”, and rely on “the old-fashioned way” to win the country’s election.

His party had been caught using neuroscience to gauge voters’ opinions about their candidate for the presidency and the party was embarrassed. Subsequently, we know from other sources the party carried on using neuroscience techniques. Someone even described their approach as “the new way to win elections”.

The approach is called neuropolitics and uses brain science to understand our politics. It applies the insights of neurology to explain why we take part in protests, vote for particular parties and even why we lie about our true feelings in opinion polls, potentially skewing the results to give the public a false impression of who is going to win.

I studied neuroscience before I gained a doctorate in political science. Back then the study of the brain was a utopian strain of research, but things have changed. And this has political implications. The Mexican case is one example of politicians exploiting neuroscience to their electoral advantage, but there are many others, which I write about in my new book The Political Brain.

It might seem like science fiction. But it is a fact. We already know a lot about how our brains influence our political beliefs and reveal our political views. Here are just four things your brain can reveal about your politics – and believe me, there are plenty more.

1. Which politicians you like

Let’s start with the basics. Advances in social neuroscience mean that we can identify the parts of the brain that get activated when you watch political advertisements – and a host of other things. We can do this because of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI scans).

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